We characterize the dispersion of firm-level productivity and demand shocks using Swedish microdata including prices and utilization and analyse the consequences for firms and the aggregate economy. Demand dispersion increases by more than TFPQ dispersion in recessions. Productivity shocks pass...

We identify an inflationary technology news shock as the leading source of business cycle variations for the postwar U.S. economy. This shock acts like a demand shock: it induces strong positive comovement in real quantities - GDP, consumption, investment - and weak positive comovement between...

We study the optimal monetary policy problem in a New Keynesian economy with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate, when the steady state natural rate (r*) becomes permanently negative. We show that the optimal policy aims to approach gradually a new steady state with positive...

We analyze the welfare impact of greater wage flexibility while taking into account explicitly the existence of the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. We show that the ZLB constraint generally amplifies the adverse effects of greater wage flexibility on welfare when...

I evaluate the welfare performance of a target for the level of nominal GDP in a New Keynesian model with unemployment, accounting for a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. Nominal GDP targeting is compared to employment targeting, a conventional Taylor rule, and the...

We use Swedish administrative individual-level data to document five facts about the distributional income effects of monetary policy. (i) The effects of monetary policy shocks are U-shaped with respect to the income distribution-i.e., expansionary shocks increase the incomes of high- and...

"Leaning against the wind" - a tighter monetary policy than necessary for stabilizing inflation around the inflation target and unemployment around a long-run sustainable rate - has been justified as a way of reducing household indebtedness. In a recent paper Lars Svensson claims that this...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we .nd that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically signi.cant...

In this paper our main aim is to quantify the role that housing collateral plays for the monetary transmission mechanism. Furthermore, we want to explore the implications of the increase in household indebtedness, and specifically the loan-to-value ratio, in the last two decades. We set up a two...

We use a standard quantitative business cycle model with nominal price and wage rigidities to estimate two measures of economic ineffciency in recent U.S. data: the output gap - the gap between the actual and effcient levels of output - and the labor wedge - the wedge between households'...